maria....@gmail.com
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Dear friends,
I am a Lecturer in Early Years Education who is dedicated in supporting young children and finding ways to enhance individual motivation and capacity to pursue STEM careers. I strongly believe that gender stereotypes can create significant skills gaps with associated negative economic impacts, and investing in education is the most effective way to tackle this. Previous interventions focusing on tackling gender stereotypes at secondary school level were unsuccessful, because they were found to be too late to make a change. This is why it is now necessary to focus our efforts during the early years of child’s life, when aspirations and attitudes are still being formed.
I have developed a research project which will enable us to identify the age at which gender stereotypes emerge in the early years of life, using a very well designed and piloted questionnaire. Identifying the specific period in time during which gender stereotypes develop will us, and many other researcher to target our efforts of suppressing gender stereotypes. In my proposed project, I have developed a workshop (already piloted) which is specifically designed to promote the collaboration of parents, teachers and other professionals in the community, in order for everyone to work together and develop an action plan (appropriate for each contexts) that will help to collectively tackle the development of gender stereotypes. An overarching aim of each workshop will be to identify the key characteristics of a pedagogy that will be gender neutral and inclusive, without labelling children and what they can or should achieve based on their gender. The study, as it stands at the moments, would last approximately 2 years and would need approximately £50 000 in order to be successfully delivered in 3 countries.
To do that, I have put together an international team of academics, from countries such as United Kingdom, Mexico and India, who have the same passion as me and also have experience in researching this topic. The origin of gender stereotypes is a complex, global issue, as multifaceted as the cultures from which these preconceived notions originate. Our team, which combines a range of multi-disciplinary skills, knowledge and experiences, offers the possibility to explore this issue in more than one countries simultaneously.
We are currently seeking for funding opportunities that will help us to develop and deliver this project. We were wondering it this would interest Google and/or if you are able to offer any advice that might help us with this.
We are looking forward to hearing back from you.
Thank you very much in advance.
Dr Maria Kambouri-Danos